[1] The title of the project is in reference to Ibrahim El Salahi’s 1961-5 painting “Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I”

Imagination is the sharpest tool against colonialism. Activating an archive requires breaking the passivity of the act of seeing, making the viewer an active participant through imagination. This task is made harder by the inherent sterility and order of the institutional archive as a concept, allowing the distance to widen between the viewer and the material. Reborn Sounds presents an alternative mode of interaction with archives. Instead of searching for a singular truth within a photograph, the project embraces all the potential falsities of an image. Just as personal interpretation is central to art, this project invites personal interpretation of archival material. It activates conversations about the archive not through studying its subjects, but through relating to them; joining instead of observing.

Reborn Sounds is born out of the belief that it is crucial to get acquainted with assessing representations of ourselves in the archival photograph, because we are continuously inhabiting a future archive.  It is merely our window now to be the observer, before inevitably becoming the subject tomorrow.

Where photographic art invites possibility and interpretation, the archival image is presented as rigid and certain. The collection “Little Aden Oil Refinery - Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC),” housed at Akkasah Photography Archive at New York University Abu Dhabi, was photographed by an unnamed British representative of the AIOC. The pictures were taken in Aden, Yemen, circa 1954, and are mostly concerned with workers, machinery, and the desert. One image from the collection, not shared in this project out of respect, shows a worker’s head and shoulders crushed under a collapsed structure. To the left, the shadow of the photographer looms eerily above the potentially deceased worker. If the photograph was taken for administrative purposes, what does it mean for it to live in this archive now?

This project is a rejection of the reality offered in the collection, a refusal to define the subjects of the photograph by their capturer. This gesture extends beyond this particular photographer to all colonial archives. By breaking the subjects’ passivity through imagining the sounds of the photograph, they appear closer and more human. It is an exercise in empathizing with subjects of archives.

When an Arab confronts the photographs in the collection, the British photographer’s lens stands in-between them and the subject. A language or a song could break the spell of the colonial gaze, immediately connecting the two, observer and subject, in a moment that cannot be decoded by the photographer. A connection that transcends time and place, restoring dignity.

Of all pictures in the collection, very few, if any, feature the subjects in a state of autonomy. Instead, we see the sides of their faces, their bodies from afar, pictured as one lump, or caught mid-action. The only person with the privilege of confronting the camera on their own terms is the photographer, his male gaze staring intently into the lens. His power is disrupted by the lack of any female subjects in the collection, their striking absence noted. Due to the photographer’s inability to access female spaces, his identity becomes a hindrance to the task of documentation. We, of course, know that the female is present, not through archival confirmation, but through the simple fact that life itself is present. The project echoes the sentiment of a quote by author and poet Iman Mersal: “The image exists for the purpose of remembering what is absent from it.[2]”

The journey to activate the “Little Aden Oil Refinery” collection started with a simple question, ignited by looking at one of the photos. The image captured the scene of a busy café. What was playing on that radio in the background when the photo was taken?

Pioneer Yemeni singer Taqiya Al-Tawiliyya began her career a few years before the Yemeni 1962 revolution. In an interview recorded shortly before her death, she recalls being told she had a hideous voice. She was even poisoned by a relative when she first started performing as a young woman. During the ambulance ride to the hospital, it was her own song playing on the radio. Through bringing her voice to the project, it grounds the photo in her life, if only through imagination.

Memories of colonialism are abundant and well preserved. By contrast, the voices of those who lived under it are seldom found. However, the more I engaged with the meticulousness of colonial archives, the more I softened and came to appreciate the pitfalls of crowdsourced archives. Not those perfectly kept in Victorian buildings, locked away behind bureaucracy and plastic-covered sheets. Rather, those that live on the internet, the ones you can look up on YouTube or a 12-year-old Facebook, the ones that are perhaps taken for granted because they do not fit the Western notion of what an archive should look like. Those are the audio archives that supplemented this project, uploads of personal collections of radio recordings and cassette tapes.

There is an inherent hope in the act of seeking out an archive, a secret wish to uncover a treasure of autonomous memories. As an Arab navigating Western institutional archives, that wish has never been granted. Instead, it was met with disappointment and sympathy for the subjects. In my inability to time-travel or independently solve decades of ongoing colonialism, I imagine.

This archival activation was developed for the Webinar Archives in Dialogue: The Gendered Lives of Photographic Archives. Archives in Dialogue is a digital humanities initiative based at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.

[2] Īmān Mirsāl et al., How to Mend : Motherhood and Its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta, Berlin, 2018), 86.